At the top of my wishlist

right now, is to jump into bed (I wish mine was as nice as the one in the pic)... The last few days have been quite hectic, maybe not so much in the quantity of the stuff I needed to do, but very much in the density. Not only do we have two exams come up this Saturday (including the dreaded final Finance exam, which is freaking me out to no end. I'm just not a formula person and when we're doing the mock exams the prof keeps on saying 'this one's easy, it's just formulas' and I think 'I know. That's my problem: my brain doesn't do formulas. It does stories. No formulas.'), but we also had a full load of class this week, and today there were two company presentations I attended. Hang on, I'm getting waaaaay ahead of myself here. Let's start with yesterday and the highlight of my week so far and follow this dazzling Diva-MBA reporter around.

Last night a few good friends and I went to a talk at the Royal Society of Arts, called Design or Die! which was organized by the Centre for Creative Business (which is a partnership between LBS and the University of the Arts London). Panellists were Sebastian Conran, Sir George Cox (chairman of the UK Design Council and writer of the Cox Review on Creativity in Business, commissioned by the UK government), Wayne Hemingway and Nico Macdonald and the topic revolved around the idea of design being the next big thing that is going to save the British economy. It's a very topical issue at the moment, and I found it odd and a little sad that the list of attendees mainly consisted of 'artsy' people and 'designery' people, but hardly any business people. It turned out to be a little bit of preaching to the choir, and I kept on thinking 'how will I explain this to my fellow MBA students who want to be bankers? How will I explain the added value of design and creativity to business students who think that creativity is holding a painter's brush?'.

Today we had Marketing in the morning (product line design using a Timbuk2 example), followed by a company Milkround presentation by Shell, which was nice and energetic (no pun intended) offering lots of great opportunities in both their upstream and downstream business, but again (like with BP) they didn't push my heartbeat through the roof, so I won't apply. There are plenty of much more qualified and interesting people out there, Shell do not need to waste time and effort on me. After a quick talk at the networking reception and some of the lovely dessert-munchie thingy's they serve, I dashed off to Decision and Risk Analysis, followed by some frantic email-sending, and off to the next presentation of the day: Google. And to be really honest (although that probably means that no one will ever be able to find this blog through Google henceforth) I wasn't too impressed. I don't know what I thought before I went in, maybe that they'd be a free-spirited, funky kinda company, but it felt like a cult (albeit a funky one), and I wasn't buying it. Maybe I'm too cynical, but it just didn't make my heart flutter. So again, I won't apply. And then, to top this day off, there was a Finance review session (which made my heart sink into my shoes)(sorry, Dutch saying literally translated) for the exam this Saturday. And now I need a stiff whisky. And a good night's sleep.